Welcome to the Princess and the Pea Group for EDS Research and Support. You may be wondering how the group got its name. If you have any form of Ehlers-Danlos you likely already know how uncomfortable sleeping can be. Most people that we have come across with EDS have a great deal of pain during what is supposed to be the most calming and peaceful time. Sleep is when our bodies heal and recuperate in preparation for the next day. With EDS, sleep can be disrupted by subluxing and dislocating joints, aches, pains and various symptoms of disorders commonly seen associated with EDS such as P.O.T.S and Chiari Malformation. Like in the story, the skin can be so sensitive as to make even a wrinkle in a bed sheet feel like you are laying on a bed of tree branches. Here is a portion of the story.

In the middle of the storm somebody knocked at the town gate, and the old King himself sent to open it. It was a princess who stood outside, but she was in a terrible state from the rain and the storm. The water streamed out of her hair and her clothes; it ran in at the top of her shoes and out at the heel, but she said that she was a real princess. ‘Well we shall soon see if that is true,’ thought the old Queen, but she said nothing. She went into the bedroom, took all the bed clothes off and laid a pea on the bedstead: then she took twenty mattresses and piled them on top of the pea, and then twenty feather beds on top of the mattresses. This was where the princess was to sleep that night. In the morning they asked her how she slept. ‘Oh terribly bad!’ said the princess. ‘I have hardly closed my eyes the whole night! Heaven knows what was in the bed. I seemed to be lying upon some hard thing, and my whole body is black and blue this morning. It is terrible!’ They saw at once that she must be a real princess when she had felt the pea through twenty mattresses and twenty feather beds. Nobody but a real princess could have such a delicate skin.